Laurent's Blog

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Just like every other Apple fan out there I was excited about the announcement of the new iPhone 3GS yesterday. I was considering upgrading but AT&T ruined it for me.

I currently have the original iPhone (Edge network) and paid the non-subsidized price of $399 for it. The plan costs $20/month, including 200 SMS. Upgrading to iPhone 3GS will cost $199, plus $30/month data plan + $5/month for 200 SMS. That's $15 more per month, so the total comes to $199 + (24 x $15) = $559. Wow.

All of that for the same lousy AT&T service? And you can pretty much count on AT&T to charge extra for MMS and Tethering... so... NO THANKS.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

The kids wanted to watch a movie tonight, so I decided that I was going to save myself a trip to the rental place and give iTunes movie rental a shot for the first time.
I first made sure that I could connect the laptop to the TV, that the sound worked, and that I could find a movie they'd liked.
We decided on the "102 Dalmatians", they kids were excited, we even watched the preview... but the iTunes Store let me down, with a bunch of dissappointed kids.
I tried almost 10 times, and it failed every time... So I guess I'm done with iTunes movie rentals. Thanks Apple. :(

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Is the music industry finally realizing that DRM was the stupidest idea on earth, or are they being pushed by a few rebelling retailers? Either way this is good news for us the consumer. If we can buy CDs and legally rip them on our computers to listen on iPod, iPhone, Zune (etc...) then why can't we do the same thing when buying digital tracks online? So far Walmart, Amazon and now MySpace are offering 100% DRM-free tracks, so what are you waiting for Apple?

Oh, and when you finally decide to offer ALL your tracks without DRM, don't forget to give us a tool to fix all the DRM infected tracks we've bought on iTunes so far. Thanks.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Firebug 1.2b1 for Firefox 3 RC1 has just been released!This is good news because I have been having so many problems with 1.1 that I ended up disabling my favorite Firefox plugin (and actually the only plugin I use). But from the Firebug announcement it sounds like the problem might have been coming from FF 3.0b5...

I even tried an alpha version of Firebug 1.2 but couldn't figure out what was wrong with it, I couldn't disable it... turns out that they have redesign the interface and there is no 'disable' option anymore.

Monday, May 19, 2008

While toying around with the idea of building a webapp for the iPhone I came across the need to build the equivalent of a checkbox. The problem is that checkboxes are a bit too small to be used accurately with fingertips and Apple has already come up with the perfect solution, the cool sliding ON/OFF switches that you find on the iPhone native apps.So I tried to duplicate the switch in a browser, just using HTML, CSS3 and a bit of javascript.I'm pretty happy with the results, I even managed to animate the switch. Until iPhone 2.0 gets released in June (with safari 3.1 for iPhone) you will only be able to see the animation on the desktop version of Safari 3.1 (unless, of course, you are already running the iPhone 2.0 beta)The switch could still use better colors and gradients, but it will do for now.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

The new Google Reader interface for iPhone is out!It is a LOT faster than the previous version, it loads the posts inline when you open them so there is no page reloads.It only has the "Share" and "Mark as read" options so far, but like the post says, it's the first public beta.And it even comes with a neat icon when you save the bookmark to your home screen.Point your iPhone to http://www.google.com/reader/i/